Infertility in Men Treatment

Any fertility treatment may be expected to have an effect on semen quality roughly three months after it is started, as this is the length of time required for a single cycle of spermatogenesis, or sperm production. If neither surgical nor medical therapy is appropriate, assisted reproductive technologies are possible.
In choosing a treatment plan, consideration should be given to each couple's long-term goals, financial constraints, and the results of the female partner's evaluation in addition to male factor findings.

Specific Therapy

The most successful medical therapy for male infertility involves reversing chemical, infectious or endocrine imbalances. This is called specific therapy, and it is usually successful because treatment is based on the correction of well-defined problems.
Examples of this include:

• Treatment for acute prostatitis, epididymitis or varicocele
• The replacement of the pituitary hormones — follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and leutinizing hormone (LH) — for radiation or surgically induced pituitary disease
• The administration of testosterone in men with hypoandrogenic hypogonadism

Empiric Therapy

Another kind of treatment, called empiric therapy, attempts to correct rather ill-defined conditions. The use of clomiphene citrate, tamoxifen or ProXeed for low sperm density or motility are examples of this form of therapy.

These treatments often have limited success because the generally intact mechanisms within the body tend to counteract the intended effect. In other words, hormonal treatments based on the principle that "if some hormone is good, then more is better" are destined to failure and should be avoided.

Assisted Reproductive Technology

Treating specific illnesses may or may not treat the fertility problem. At least 10 percent of infertility problems are due to unknown causes and another 30 percent are due to problems in both the male and female partners.

In addition to medication and surgical infertility treatments to treat specific health conditions in men and women, a new class of treatments — called assisted reproductive technologies, or ART — has been developed. The most common ART is in vitro fertilization, or IVF, but new procedures can enhance the IVF process or address other infertility conditions. These procedures for men include:

• Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)
• Sperm extraction procedures, such as:
• Vasal aspiration
• Epididymal aspiration
• Testicular sperm extraction
• "Mapping" the failing testes
• Ovum donors and embryo or semen freezing

Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI)

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, is a technique developed to help achieve fertilization for couples with severe male factor infertility or couples who have had failure to fertilize in a previous in vitro fertilization attempt. The procedure overcomes many of the barriers to fertilization and allows couples with little hope of achieving successful pregnancy to obtain fertilized embryos.


The technique involves very precise maneuvers to pick up a single live sperm and inject it directly into the center of a human egg. The procedure requires that the female partner undergo ovarian stimulation with fertility medications so that several mature eggs develop. These eggs are then suctioned through the vagina, using vaginal ultrasound, and incubated under precise conditions in the embryology laboratory. The semen sample is prepared by spinning the sperm cells through a special medium. This solution separates live sperm from debris and most of the dead sperm. The specialist picks up the single live sperm in a glass needle and injects it directly into the egg.

Through the ICSI procedure, many couples with difficult male factor infertility problems have achieved pregnancy. Fertilization rates of 70 percent to 80 percent of all eggs injected are currently being achieved, and pregnancy rates are comparable to those seen with IVF in couples with no male factor infertility.

Sperm Extraction Procedures

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection has revolutionized the treatment of male infertility. The sperm requirement for egg fertilization has dropped from hundreds of thousands for in vitro fertilization (IVF), to one viable sperm required for ICSI when combined with IVF.

This has led to the recent development of aggressive new surgical techniques to provide viable sperm for egg fertilization from men with low or no sperm count. This also has pushed urologists beyond the ejaculate and into the male reproductive tract to find sperm. Presently, sources of sperm in otherwise azoospermic patients, or those with no ejaculated sperm, include the vas deferens, epididymis and testicle, using sperm aspiration techniques in which the sperm is suctioned from the organ.

Sperm aspiration techniques involve the use of minor surgical procedures to collect sperm from organs within the genital tract. These techniques are indicated for men in whom the transport of sperm is not possible because the ductal system that normally carries sperm to the ejaculate is absent, such as with the congenital absence of the vas deferens, or unable to be reconstructed.

Most recently, sperm has been fairly reliably extracted — 60 percent to 70 percent of the time — from the testes of men with sperm production problems of such severity that no sperm is found in the ejaculatory ducts.

It is important to realize, however, that IVF technology is required to achieve a pregnancy with the vast majority of these extraction procedures, and success rates are intimately tied to a complex and complementary program of assisted reproduction for both partners.

For male infertility treatment, low sperm count, azoospermia get free online consultation today.